Policy evaluation with sufficient macro statistics: a primer

Summary Impulse responses and forecasts are central concepts for policymakers. They are also sufficient statistics to solve many important macroeconomic problems, from policy counterfactuals to policy evaluation, and offer a promising alternative to the standard structural modelling approach. In this work, we discuss and extend recent progress on the use of these sufficient macro statistics for policy evaluation. We illustrate the methods by evaluating the performance of the European Central Bank over 1999–2023.